How Signal’s Meredith Whittaker Remembers SignalGate: ‘No Fucking Way’
In March of this year, Meredith Whittaker was at her kitchen table in Paris when Signal, the encrypted messaging service she runs, suddenly became an international headline. A colleague sent their group chat the story ricocheting across the globe: “The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans.”
Of course, you know the rest: In the piece, The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, detailed how he’d been added to a Signal chat about an upcoming military operation in Yemen. Over the following days and weeks, the incident would become known as “SignalGate”—and created a legitimate risk that the fallout would cause people to question Signal’s security, instead of pointing their fingers at the profoundly dubious op-sec of senior-level Trump officials.
That never happened. In fact, Signal’s user numbers grew by leaps and bounds, both in the US and around the world. It’s growth that, Whittaker thinks, is coming at a time when “people are feeling in a much deeper, much more personal way why privacy might be important.”
Related Knowledge Center: Signalgate
The inadvertent inclusion of the Atlantic editor on a Signal group chat sharing information about a pending U.S. military strike has created an uproar of accusations and denials. It’s also exposed a Pandora’s box of shoddy digital security practices within the Trump administration
The White House vs. the press | Digital privacy and data security
Related Knowledge Center: Digital privacy and data security
If you’re online, you’re generating a constant stream of information about yourself — sometimes voluntarily, sometimes unwittingly — that is assembled and used to craft your online experience. And generate wealth for data brokers. Meanwhile, designers and managers of the digital infrastructure on which the world depends are engaged in a never-ending effort to thwart attempts, by both criminal enterprises and state actors, to exploit vulnerabilities in those systems.
Signalgate | State surveillance